Prize Recipient

Gabriela Gonzalez
Louisiana State University

Citation:

"For her significant impact on the field of gravitation wave physics through her many important technical and scientific contributions to the Laser Interferometric Gravitation Wave Observatory (LIGO) and for communicating the excitement of this field to the scientific community and the public."

Background:

Gabriela Gonzálezwas born in 1965 in Córdoba, Argentina. She attended the University of Córdobato obtain her undergradutate degree of "Licienciada" in 1988. She moved to the US in 1989, and got her Ph.D in 1995 in Syracuse University. She worked with the MIT-LIGO group in 1995-1997 as a staff scientist, joined the faculty of Penn State in 1997, and the faculty of Louisiana State University in 2001. She was promoted to Associate Professor at LSU in 2004.

Her research interest is in the detection of gravitational waves with interferometric detectors, such as the one in the LIGO Livingston Observatory, in Livingston, LA. She has published several papers on the specific predictions of Brownian motion as a limiting sources to the detectors' sensitivity. She was a founding member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and has participated intensely in the commissioning of the detector at the Livingston Observatory. She and her group is now very involved in the instrumental characterization and calibration of the data collected in the data-taking Science Runs performed by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, as well as in the analysis of the data being taken with the LIGO detectors. She co-leads one of the four data analysis groups in the Collaboration, dedicated to the search of gravitational waves generated by binary systems of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) in the final inspiraling stage before coalescence.